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seen her house at the Onondaga Indian Reservation and it was not too far removed from an unpainted shack as I recall, principally because, as I learned later, her husband was a drunkard. But this was one of my earliest recollections of the seamier side of life although, at the time, I was too young to attach any great significance to it. I remember, also, hearing my parents deploring the fact that Annie's husband was no good and refused to work, because Annie was such a fine woman, attractive, immaculate, high principled, and her daughter, Little Annie, was such a fine child. But I was too young to become either greatly impressed or concerned about the situation. That was the way it was, that's all, and that was it. 

However, by the time Annie left us in 1912 and we got Nellie McDermott, or it may have been late in 1911, I was beginning to think about class distinctions a little more. Nellie was an Irish immigrant girl in her 20s and she lived way down in the valley area somewhere below and beyond Lincoln School. She lived with us but had Thursday and Sunday afternoon and evening off as I recall. Also, she went to church every Sunday morning, going to early Mass so she could get back in time to prepare breakfast. This was my first exposure to Catholicism and I gradually began to associate it with the working class, the servant class, who, at that time must have comprised a very high percentage of the Catholic Church. To this day, I have a lingering vestige of this feeling that Catholics are inferior. I fight it, I reason with myself about it, but it is very difficult to get it completely out of my consciousness. Although Nellie was with us for about four years, I never saw her home, principally because she never offered to take me there. But I think Nellie liked me and I liked her. She was a good-sized girl with a plump Irish face, black hair and pink cheeks, broad-beamed, big-breasted, and in warm weather, exuding big B. O. -- I can smell it yet and I can't understand why my mother didn't acquaint Nellie with the facts of life on the matter. 

In spite of the ideas outlined above I got along fine with the children of "the other half" at school and liked them very much. As I've mentioned before, I visited Bill Legge's house, and felt pretty intimate with Charlie Williams and a boy named Blume who lived next door to a rabbit and ferret-raiser on Helen Street not far from us. I liked some of the Italian kids very much. Then there was a layer of half way between the "rich bugs" as we were sometimes called, and the proletariat who lived on the other side of the hill. There was Francis Harbach and George Salisbury who lived on the borderline in modest homes relatively speaking but nevertheless practically next door to the affluent. They were good kids and I liked them and played with them but they weren't quite "in." And then came the Pierce affair about which I've already written, wherein it suddenly became evident that it was possible to be propelled downward from